OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Neural Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in NLP---A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Deep neural networks excel at learning from labeled data and achieve state-of-the-art resultson a wide array of Natural Language Processing tasks. In contrast, learning from unlabeled data, especially under domain shift, remains a challenge. Motivated by the latest advances, in this survey we review neural unsupervised domain adaptation techniques which do not require labeled target domain data. This is a more challenging yet a more widely applicable setup. We outline methods, from early traditional non-neural methods to pre-trained model transfer. We also revisit the notion of domain, and we uncover a bias in the type of Natural Language Processing tasks which received most attention. Lastly, we outline future directions, particularly the broader need for out-of-distribution generalization of future NLP.
A multimodal approach for multi-label movie genre classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Movie genre classification is a challenging task that has increasingly attracted the attention of researchers. In this paper, we addressed the multi-label classification of the movie genres in a multimodal way. For this purpose, we created a dataset composed of trailer video clips, subtitles, synopses, and movie posters taken from 152,622 movie titles from The Movie Database. The dataset was carefully curated and organized, and it was also made available as a contribution of this work. Each movie of the dataset was labeled according to a set of eighteen genre labels. We extracted features from these data using different kinds of descriptors, namely Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Statistical Spectrum Descriptor , Local Binary Pattern with spectrograms, Long-Short Term Memory, and Convolutional Neural Networks. The descriptors were evaluated using different classifiers, such as BinaryRelevance and ML-kNN. We have also investigated the performance of the combination of different classifiers/features using a late fusion strategy, which obtained encouraging results. Based on the F-Score metric, our best result, 0.628, was obtained by the fusion of a classifier created using LSTM on the synopses, and a classifier created using CNN on movie trailer frames. When considering the AUC-PR metric, the best result, 0.673, was also achieved by combining those representations, but in addition, a classifier based on LSTM created from the subtitles was used. These results corroborate the existence of complementarity among classifiers based on different sources of information in this field of application. As far as we know, this is the most comprehensive study developed in terms of the diversity of multimedia sources of information to perform movie genre classification.
DeepMark++: Real-time Clothing Detection at the Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Clothing recognition is the most fundamental AI application challenge within the fashion domain. While existing solutions offer decent recognition accuracy, they are generally slow and require significant computational resources. In this paper we propose a single-stage approach to overcome this obstacle and deliver rapid clothing detection and keypoint estimation. Our solution is based on a multi-target network CenterNet, and we introduce several powerful post-processing techniques to enhance performance. Our most accurate model achieves results comparable to state-of-the-art solutions on the DeepFashion2 dataset, and our light and fast model runs at 17 FPS on the Huawei P40 Pro smartphone. In addition, we achieved second place in the DeepFashion2 Landmark Estimation Challenge 2020 with 0.582 mAP on the test dataset.
Smartphone Sensors for Modeling Human-Computer Interaction: General Outlook and Research Datasets for User Authentication
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we list the sensors commonly available in modern smartphones and provide a general outlook of the different ways these sensors can be used for modeling the interaction between human and smartphones. We then provide a taxonomy of applications that can exploit the signals originated by these sensors in three different dimensions, depending on the main information content embedded in the signals exploited in the application: neuromotor skills, cognitive functions, and behaviors/routines. We then summarize a representative selection of existing research datasets in this area, with special focus on applications related to user authentication, including key features and a selection of the main research results obtained on them so far. Then, we perform the experimental work using the HuMIdb database (Human Mobile Interaction database), a novel multimodal mobile database that includes 14 mobile sensors captured from 600 participants. We evaluate a biometric authentication system based on simple linear touch gestures using a Siamese Neural Network architecture. Very promising results are achieved with accuracies up to 87% for person authentication based on a simple and fast touch gesture.
Foreground-aware Semantic Representations for Image Harmonization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Image harmonization is an important step in photo editing to achieve visual consistency in composite images by adjusting the appearances of foreground to make it compatible with background. Previous approaches to harmonize composites are based on training of encoder-decoder networks from scratch, which makes it challenging for a neural network to learn a high-level representation of objects. We propose a novel architecture to utilize the space of high-level features learned by a pre-trained classification network. We create our models as a combination of existing encoder-decoder architectures and a pre-trained foreground-aware deep high-resolution network. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on existing image harmonization benchmark and set up a new state-of-the-art in terms of MSE and PSNR metrics. The code and trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/saic-vul/image_harmonization}.
DHash: Enabling Dynamic and Efficient Hash Tables
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Given a specified average load factor, hash tables offer the appeal of constant time lookup operations. However, hash tables could face severe hash collisions because of malicious attacks, buggy applications, or even bursts of incoming data, compromising this practical advantage. In this paper, we present DHash, a hash table that overcomes this challenge by allowing programmers to dynamically change its hash function on the fly, without affecting other concurrent operations such as lookup, insert, and delete. DHash is modular and allows programmers to select a variety of lock-free/wait-free set algorithms as the implementation of hash table buckets. With this flexibility, they can make trade-offs between the algorithm's progress guarantee, performance, and engineering efforts, and create DHash implementations that meet their requirements best. Evaluations on three types of architectures show that DHash noticeably outperforms other practical alternatives under heavy workloads. With a load factor of 20, DHash outperforms the other three most widely used hash tables by factors of 1.4-2.0, and when the load factor increases to 200, DHash is 2.3-6.2 times faster.
LFTag: A Scalable Visual Fiducial System with Low Spatial Frequency
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Visual fiducial systems are a key component of many robotics and AR/VR applications for 6-DOF monocular relative pose estimation and target identification. This paper presents LFTag, a visual fiducial system based on topological detection and relative position data encoding which optimizes data density within spatial frequency constraints. The marker is constructed to resolve rotational ambiguity, which combined with the robust geometric and topological false positive rejection, allows all marker bits to be used for data. When compared to existing state-of-the-art square binary markers (AprilTag) and topological markers (TopoTag) in simulation, the proposed fiducial system (LFTag) offers significant advances in dictionary size and range. LFTag 3x3 achieves 546 times the dictionary size of AprilTag 25h9 and LFTag 4x4 achieves 126 thousand times the dictionary size of AprilTag 41h12 while simultaneously achieving longer detection range. LFTag 3x3 also achieves more than twice the detection range of TopoTag 4x4 at the same dictionary size.
You say Normalizing Flows I see Bayesian Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Normalizing flows have emerged as an important family of deep neural networks for modelling complex probability distributions. In this note, we revisit their coupling and autoregressive transformation layers as probabilistic graphical models and show that they reduce to Bayesian networks with a pre-defined topology and a learnable density at each node. From this new perspective, we provide three results. First, we show that stacking multiple transformations in a normalizing flow relaxes independence assumptions and entangles the model distribution. Second, we show that a fundamental leap of capacity emerges when the depth of affine flows exceeds 3 transformation layers. Third, we prove the non-universality of the affine normalizing flow, regardless of its depth.
Bi-directional Exponential Angular Triplet Loss for RGB-Infrared Person Re-Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

RGB-Infrared person re-identification (RGB-IR Re- ID) is a cross-modality matching problem, where the modality discrepancy is a big challenge. Most existing works use Euclidean metric based constraints to resolve the discrepancy between features of images from different modalities. However, these methods are incapable of learning angularly discriminative feature embedding because Euclidean distance cannot measure the included angle between embedding vectors effectively. As an angularly discriminative feature space is important for classifying the human images based on their embedding vectors, in this paper, we propose a novel ranking loss function, named Bi-directional Exponential Angular Triplet Loss, to help learn an angularly separable common feature space by explicitly constraining the included angles between embedding vectors. Moreover, to help stabilize and learn the magnitudes of embedding vectors, we adopt a common space batch normalization layer. The quantitative and qualitative experiments on the SYSU-MM01 and RegDB dataset support our analysis. On SYSU-MM01 dataset, the performance is improved from 7.40% / 11.46% to 38.57% / 38.61% for rank-1 accuracy / mAP compared with the baseline. The proposed method can be generalized to the task of single-modality Re-ID and improves the rank-1 accuracy / mAP from 92.0% / 81.7% to 94.7% / 86.6% on the Market-1501 dataset, from 82.6% / 70.6% to 87.6% / 77.1% on the DukeMTMC-reID dataset. Code: https://github.com/prismformore/expAT
Should artificial agents ask for help in human-robot collaborative problem-solving?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Transferring as fast as possible the functioning of our brain to artificial intelligence is an ambitious goal that would help advance the state of the art in AI and robotics. It is in this perspective that we propose to start from hypotheses derived from an empirical study in a human-robot interaction and to verify if they are validated in the same way for children as for a basic reinforcement learning algorithm. Thus, we check whether receiving help from an expert when solving a simple close-ended task (the Towers of Hanoï) allows to accelerate or not the learning of this task, depending on whether the intervention is canonical or requested by the player. Our experiences have allowed us to conclude that, whether requested or not, a Q-learning algorithm benefits in the same way from expert help as children do.
Reducing DNN Labelling Cost using Surprise Adequacy: An Industrial Case Study for Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are rapidly being adopted by the automotive industry, due to their impressive performance in tasks that are essential for autonomous driving. Object segmentation is one such task: its aim is to precisely locate boundaries of objects and classify the identified objects, helping autonomous cars to recognise the road environment and the traffic situation. Not only is this task safety critical, but developing a DNN based object segmentation module presents a set of challenges that are significantly different from traditional development of safety critical software. The development process in use consists of multiple iterations of data collection, labelling, training, and evaluation. Among these stages, training and evaluation are computation intensive while data collection and labelling are manual labour intensive. This paper shows how development of DNN based object segmentation can be improved by exploiting the correlation between Surprise Adequacy (SA) and model performance. The correlation allows us to predict model performance for inputs without manually labelling them. This, in turn, enables understanding of model performance, more guided data collection, and informed decisions about further training. In our industrial case study the technique allows cost savings of up to 50% with negligible evaluation inaccuracy. Furthermore, engineers can trade off cost savings versus the tolerable level of inaccuracy depending on different development phases and scenarios.
Treatment Policy Learning in Multiobjective Settings with Fully Observed Outcomes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In several medical decision-making problems, such as antibiotic prescription, laboratory testing can provide precise indications for how a patient will respond to different treatment options. This enables us to "fully observe" all potential treatment outcomes, but while present in historical data, these results are infeasible to produce in real-time at the point of the initial treatment decision. Moreover, treatment policies in these settings often need to trade off between multiple competing objectives, such as effectiveness of treatment and harmful side effects. We present, compare, and evaluate three approaches for learning individualized treatment policies in this setting: First, we consider two indirect approaches, which use predictive models of treatment response to construct policies optimal for different trade-offs between objectives. Second, we consider a direct approach that constructs such a set of policies without intermediate models of outcomes. Using a medical dataset of Urinary Tract Infection (UTI) patients, we show that all approaches learn policies that achieve strictly better performance on all outcomes than clinicians, while also trading off between different objectives. We demonstrate additional benefits of the direct approach, including flexibly incorporating other goals such as deferral to physicians on simple cases.
Temporal-Differential Learning in Continuous Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, a new reinforcement learning (RL) method known as the method of temporal differential is introduced. Compared to the traditional temporal-difference learning method, it plays a crucial role in developing novel RL techniques for continuous environments. In particular, the continuous-time least squares policy evaluation (CT-LSPE) and the continuous-time temporal-differential (CT-TD) learning methods are developed. Both theoretical and empirical evidences are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed temporal-differential learning methodology.
Data-Driven Learning of Boolean Networks and Functions by Optimal Causation Entropy Principle (BoCSE)
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Boolean functions and networks are commonly used in the modeling and analysis of complex biological systems, and this paradigm is highly relevant in other important areas in data science and decision making, such as in the medical field and in the finance industry. Automated learning of a Boolean network and Boolean functions, from data, is a challenging task due in part to the large number of unknowns (including both the structure of the network and the functions) to be estimated, for which a brute force approach would be exponentially complex. In this paper we develop a new information theoretic methodology that we show to be significantly more efficient than previous approaches. Building on the recently developed optimal causation entropy principle (oCSE), that we proved can correctly infer networks distinguishing between direct versus indirect connections, we develop here an efficient algorithm that furthermore infers a Boolean network (including both its structure and function) based on data observed from the evolving states at nodes. We call this new inference method, Boolean optimal causation entropy (BoCSE), which we will show that our method is both computationally efficient and also resilient to noise. Furthermore, it allows for selection of a set of features that best explains the process, a statement that can be described as a networked Boolean function reduced order model. We highlight our method to the feature selection in several real-world examples: (1) diagnosis of urinary diseases, (2) Cardiac SPECT diagnosis, (3) informative positions in the game Tic-Tac-Toe, and (4) risk causality analysis of loans in default status. Our proposed method is effective and efficient in all examples.
Data-Driven Prediction of Embryo Implantation Probability Using IVF Time-lapse Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The process of fertilizing a human egg outside the body in order to help those suffering from infertility to conceive is known as in vitro fertilization (IVF). Despite being the most effective method of assisted reproductive technology (ART), the average success rate of IVF is a mere 20-40%. One step that is critical to the success of the procedure is selecting which embryo to transfer to the patient, a process typically conducted manually and without any universally accepted and standardized criteria. In this paper we describe a novel data-driven system trained to directly predict embryo implantation probability from embryogenesis time-lapse imaging videos. Using retrospectively collected videos from 272 embryos, we demonstrate that, when compared to an external panel of embryologists, our algorithm results in a 12% increase of positive predictive value and a 29% increase of negative predictive value.
Security Smells in Android
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

The ubiquity of smartphones, and their very broad capabilities and usage, make the security of these devices tremendously important. Unfortunately, despite all progress in security and privacy mechanisms, vulnerabilities continue to proliferate. Research has shown that many vulnerabilities are due to insecure programming practices. However, each study has often dealt with a specific issue, making the results less actionable for practitioners. To promote secure programming practices, we have reviewed related research, and identified avoidable vulnerabilities in Android-run devices and the "security code smells" that indicate their presence. In particular, we explain the vulnerabilities, their corresponding smells, and we discuss how they could be eliminated or mitigated during development. Moreover, we develop a lightweight static analysis tool and discuss the extent to which it successfully detects several vulnerabilities in about 46,000 apps hosted by the official Android market.
An Effective Contextual Language Modeling Framework for Speech Summarization with Augmented Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Tremendous amounts of multimedia associated with speech information are driving an urgent need to develop efficient and effective automatic summarization methods. To this end, we have seen rapid progress in applying supervised deep neural network-based methods to extractive speech summarization. More recently, the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model was proposed and has achieved record-breaking success on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as question answering and language understanding. In view of this, we in this paper contextualize and enhance the state-of-the-art BERT-based model for speech summarization, while its contributions are at least three-fold. First, we explore the incorporation of confidence scores into sentence representations to see if such an attempt could help alleviate the negative effects caused by imperfect automatic speech recognition (ASR). Secondly, we also augment the sentence embeddings obtained from BERT with extra structural and linguistic features, such as sentence position and inverse document frequency (IDF) statistics. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed method on a benchmark dataset, in comparison to several classic and celebrated speech summarization methods.
Revisiting Bounded-Suboptimal Safe Interval Path Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Safe-interval path planning (SIPP) is a powerful algorithm for finding a path in the presence of dynamic obstacles. SIPP returns provably optimal solutions. However, in many practical applications of SIPP such as path planning for robots, one would like to trade-off optimality for shorter planning time. In this paper we explore different ways to build a bounded-suboptimal SIPP and discuss their pros and cons. We compare the different bounded-suboptimal versions of SIPP experimentally. While there is no universal winner, the results provide insights into when each method should be used.
Hibikino-Musashi@Home 2019 Team Description Paper
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Our team, Hibikino-Musashi@Home (HMA), was founded in 2010. It is based in the Kitakyushu Science and Research Park, Japan. Since 2010, we have participated in the RoboCup@Home Japan Open competition open platform league annually. We have also participated in the RoboCup 2017 Nagoya as an open platform league and domestic standard platform league teams, and in the RoboCup 2018 Montreal as a domestic standard platform league team. Currently, we have 23 members from seven different laboratories based in Kyushu Institute of Technology. This paper aims to introduce the activities that are performed by our team and the technologies that we use.
Sampling Techniques in Bayesian Target Encoding
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Target encoding is an effective encoding technique of categorical variables and is often used in machine learning systems for processing tabular data sets with mixed numeric and categorical variables. Recently en enhanced version of this encoding technique was proposed by using conjugate Bayesian modeling. This paper presents a further development of Bayesian encoding method by using sampling techniques, which helps in extracting information from intra-category distribution of the target variable, improves generalization and reduces target leakage.